


O Star of the Sea, rescue me

by oncewewerezombies



Category: A Handmaid's Tale - Fandom, Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Humanstuck, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Potential Romance, Sad, crossover? i guess?, dystopic aus, just sad, lemonade as a status symbol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 15:10:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8376850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncewewerezombies/pseuds/oncewewerezombies
Summary: A Handmaid's Tale fusion.
 
  Her name is Rose, and she is beautiful.





	

Her name is Rose, and she is beautiful.

You are still a waiting vessel without fullness, and this is your third house. Your last chance. After this, you do not know where you will go. You know what your fate will be, even if you do not know where it will await you. In the end, it will be the Wall. And death. Painful, agonizing death. Or perhaps you will be sent into exile, the wastes, as a Not Woman, something barren and unfemale. A worthy reward for failure. You are empty inside. Supposedly, you should be able to bear. You. You have before. You do not want to think of it, when you held the hand of your lover (you should not remember this, it hurts) and sat with your belly swelling, your hand on the curve of it and her hand over yours. Rough, beautiful. And yours; that had been the most important thing. That she had been yours.

That you had been hers.

You had been happy once. You had a lover and a child (two, there had been two that you had borne, sweating and screaming as you birthed them whole and beautiful from your body, and oh god, you missed them, where have they taken your babes), you'd been swept off your feet by blue eyes and a daredevil grin with a fistful of promise. Her hand in yours had been so sweet, her chipped nails catching on your hair when she ran her fingers through. She is gone. Her and her troublemaking, rebel rousing ways. They'd taken you, her and the children, fed you all into the machine of this new hideous regime. Now there is nothing left. You don't even have the ashes of your own self left to hold. You are nothing, barely even dust.

Your patron's wife, Rose.

You should not think of her. You are a deviant. You suppose in some ways, it must make you suited for the work that you do, there is no hope of you finding pleasure in your duty, of feeling anything other than distaste, than shame. While he breathes heavily and thrusts above you, with you in the cradle of her thighs and her hands in yours. While you're used as a stand in for her, a doll meant to walk and have an empty head, an empty womb to be filled. Emptiness. Vacuum. Space. You're nothing more than that. Once, you were a person. You remember that. You were a person, you had thoughts and ambitions, you had love.

"Would you like a cigarette?"

On rest days, you're allowed to walk around the garden. Around and around the garden. You are not allowed in public except for strictly watched excursions, two Handmaids together, but you can walk around the garden. The exercise is meant to be beneficial to your body. To help your womb open. You've had two children selfishly; it should not now be a problem to have even one, selflessly. For the good of the nation and for God. You do not think the problem is with you. You think the problem is with your patron, him, this male with his sweating and matted hair in the wrong places and not enough on top and too much. Too much. Thrusting inside you oh god, even thinking of it makes you feel unclean, polluted. You are violated. 

The Aunts would tell you that you are not, but you know by the standards of the old world gone, you are worse than merely violated.

Rose is sitting on a lounge chair, slatted and painted white, a relic. It's nothing like you have seen in years. Neither is the swimsuit she's wearing, scandalous and open. So much skin. You haven't seen a woman bare that much skin since the world became shadow and ash in twisting agonies of purity, and here she lies like some antiquated movie star with cigarette in hand and wine glass on the table by her side. Her blonde hair glints in the sun like some precious metal, encasing her fragile skull, as she exhales, smoke dissipating into the atmosphere like her breath when she watches her husband fuck you.

You can't recollect where you are for a moment.

"I'm sorry, ma'am?"

"A cigarette. Would you like one?" She fusses with the drinks next to her, the pitcher of lemonade. The glass. Condensation pearls on the side, there's ice inside it. Ice. Almost as rare as diamonds, in this new time and place. 

"Thank you, but no. Even when it was...allowed, I didn't smoke."

The scent is nostalgic, it teases your senses. _One last time pays for all,_ your lover laughs inside your memory, blue eyed, brilliant, beautiful. Fate tempting. _You know I got all the luck, babe! Don't worry so much._ Where is she now? She must be dead, they wouldn't have let her live, she wouldn't have let them tame her. Not like you've submitted, how you've laid down to be an empty vessel. The weeks of training, the way they'd broken you down...there had been women who'd fought the Aunts. Who had tried to find a place to stand and push back, struggling to keep some remnant of their own self alive - you hadn't been one of them.

You had gone inside.

You had gone away.

You are space, infinite beautiful void and they can use the body but. It is not you. It is the only way you have found to save your sanity. What you have left of it, at least. You're aware that any psychotherapist, any psychiatrist, would find you rather mad in your way. But you are alive. You are not sure whether to be proud of that or not. Perhaps you would be better off dead; with every breath and every way, you come closer and closer to this conclusion. But they're so careful of you. When you get your meal, you eat it with your fingers. There are no hooks or protrusions you could knot your stockings over, rip your terrible blood red dresses to make a noose. There are no matches, no poison, no gasoline. The cars don't even move fast enough for you to throw yourself in front of them and expect a satisfactory bruise, the few there are that are left.

You are trapped. You are consigned to this body when inside you know you are more. It would be tempting to go mad, but then. Then, where else would you have to run? There would be nothing, there would be nowhere. The tempting shores of insanity wait for you, they beckon, but you put them off for just a little longer yet while you mouth the words you are allowed, while you walk your measured way through the constrained life you've been privileged to receive. Your legs move inside your skirt like a clapper in a bell, one two, one two, and now you've become still, you don't know what to do with yourself.

"Have a glass of lemonade then." Her graceful hand gestures, and again you're reminded of Golden Age Hollywood. Of Audrey Hepburn, of Greta Garbo. Mae West. Elizabeth Taylor. Those graceful girls, so exquisitely maintained, so lady-like and with a core of pure steel replacing their spinal cord. That would bend, but only so far, and then never break.

"Oh." You glance uneasily back to the kitchen window; has someone seen this moment of humanity? Are they judging it even now? You wonder if Rose knows what it says on your file... Sapphic. Rebel. Runner. She's tempting fate even speaking to you alone. And that is quite beside offering you the glass of lemonade. "Well. I suppose the vitamin C would be good for me."

Her smile is diamonds.

"Sit down with me, and have a drink, Kanaya."

And you sit - perch is more the word, on the very edge of her partnering lounge chair - and sip. She doesn't say another word to you, and you drink. Savour the cold across your tongue, the chill prickling sourness of the lemonade as you drink something that you know must have cost a fortune. An orange is a treat. Enough lemons to be squeezed for lemonade, _sugar_ , with ice...you don't even want to think of it. But even more than that, is the feeling of being one woman, sitting with another woman, in something close to equality.

"...thank you."

"You're welcome."

What does this mean for you? You don't know. Suddenly, you don't care. You can't. 

You want this.

And you think. You think she wants it too, even if she doesn't realise the cost. You feel as though something in your chest has cracked, and you don't know what's going to come spilling out. As you catch sight of her smile, a three quarter view as she turns her face up to the sun and her pink lips meet the rim of the glass for luxurious swallow after swallow - you think you don't care. Maybe this doesn't need to be the end after all. Maybe...just maybe...despite everything, you can still find some small facet of happiness. 

_Break the sinners' fetters, make our blindness day, chase all evils from us, for all blessings pray._


End file.
